Paul King's Top 10 Tips For Performance (Part 1, tips 1-3)

For those of you not to be lucky enough to have attended last weeks Supersonic Network event in Preston, you missed a treat!! Not only did you miss out on meeting and picking the brains of some of the top minds in the music industry, you missed out on meeting the legend Paul King.

For those of you who don’t know, Paul was the manager of Tears for Fears, Dire Straits, Julian Cope and many others. His bands sold in excess of 32 million albums worldwide and he still holds the record for the most consecutive gigs by a single band at Wembley Stadium.

Paul was kind enough to bring with him some handouts concerning how to be a great performer, which, for those of you who couldnt attend, I am reproducing for you now. They will be produced in three parts as they are quite long.

Paul wrote:

To many of you these tips may seem obvious. To many, we are probably teaching you to suck eggs. To the rest I hope it is of some help. In this day and age with mp3’s, Ipods, free downloads and 100,000 unsigned bands in the UK alone, performance is more important than ever. To many bands it may be your only source of significant revenue, to all of you it’s the best opportunity to connect with existing and potential fans.

Here goes:-

1 Be Entertaining.

The music industry is a subsection of the entertainment industry. You are competing with a quiet night in front of a DVD and a takeaway, going to the movies, going to a nightclub and even buying a book! Punters pay hard earned cash to come and see you play live so give them a show they will remember, talk about and evangelise about. It is not enough to stand on stage looking bored as if you are in a rehearsal room or a painter and decorator checking the ceiling for cracks.

2 Communicate With Your Audience.

You may think it is cool to ignore an audience and act like you are some kind of megastar. Until you are, ignoring an audience is just that – ignorant. Say hello, be friendly. Ask the audience how they are doing. Introduce the band, introduce your first songs. Punters will warm to your music far more readily if they warm to you first. They will appreciate and understand what your music is about if you put the songs in context – e.g. This song is about my ex girlfriend who ran off with my uncle – help them relate to what you are about, draw them in!

3 The Energy Funnel

So many bands leave it up to the lead singer to do all the performing. Not fair. The rest of the band should support the singer by being energetic on stage and feeding this through the lead singer, creating an energy funnel that an audience will respond to and feed back to the band. Get the energy flow right and a performance spirals upwards, fans and band feeding off each others energy – get it wrong and the set will slowly but surely fall apart.

Part 2 to follow